I have started a social network for the mental health community. The site just went public 4 weeks ago, so it is relatively new. The purpose of the site is to connect families and individuals affected by mental illness.

I am having trouble getting traffic to my website, and also trouble getting people to sign up. So far, I only have about 15 users who have signed up in 4 weeks. I am to the point where I am getting about 220 page hits a day (this includes people who stumble upon the page and people who are members and navigate the page), which is double what it was 2 weeks ago. Money is a bit tight right now, so I haven't advertised.

I will list what I have done so far to spread the word:

I have used Twitter as much as I can. I am unable to follow anyone else at this point (2000 followers) and I have 656 followers. I have actually had a few people sign up from my tweeting. For every 6 or 7 tweets, I tweet about myself once, so I'm not spamming too much. -I have used most of the popular social bookmarking sites. -I did a press release when the site became public, which has gotten spread around a little bit. The only press I have gotten has been from this, which has mostly been tweets and blogs.

Here are some things I haven't done yet:

-I have done no advertising yet. For the most part, word of mouth, Twitter, and my press release account for the majority of my traffic.-I have just started a plan where I will post on forums related to mental health in order to hopefully spread the word a bit, however this is more tedious than other methods.-I have done no link exchanges yet, and according to my research, I have no backlinks yet. I would like to make this happen, I just don't know much about it.

Since the site is private, it's a niche (mental health, mental illness), and the business is the social network (revenue strictly from ads, donations, and media sales through Amazon), I feel like I am going to have more trouble making the money necessary in order to keep the site going.

Is there anything I am missing which I am not doing? Is web advertising worth the costs?

I would appreciate some input here on marketing a niche based private social network, or direct me to some info which could help me out. Thanks!

system
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2010-02-09T04:27:49Z —
#2

I think you must join many social bookmarking to promote your'e sites and business ...Or you can try to using facebook...And submit article in many article submission to get traffic ...Most important to do is consentrate in keyword for that ..

Thanks and hoping can helps

Colocated
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2010-02-11T22:56:51Z —
#3

Don't just stick to Twitter and try promoting your website on other social networking as well. Start with sites like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us